


Fat and Blood

by little_spider



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Domestic Violence, F/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-21
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-27 08:56:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5042059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/little_spider/pseuds/little_spider
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She hates him (loves him) for his gentleness in the face of her monstrosity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It begins when she is eight and he is six.

"Lucy?" His boyish lisp is more pronounced since he is half asleep still, even as he shot up from bed the moment, it seemed, she heard the click of the lock behind her and felt the rough grain of the wooden door dragging at the back of her nightdress as she slid to the nursery floor. His hair is frizzed out from his bath earlier in the evening, and she hears a faraway part of her mind chime softly, mentally adding the task of brushing and oiling his hair in the morning, of coaxing him to sit still under her hands rather than fidget, as he always does.

"Lucy?" Her name comes as if from a distance, even as she watches his pale face come closer. She will sit behind him on the bed in the morning, the coarse horsehair brush and the ivory comb (four of its teeth are broken, and he whines when the jagged ends catch and tear at his hair) balanced on her left knee, the tiny bottle of oil on the cold windowsill. She will sit behind him, and will work the comb and the brush and the oil through his hair until the rumpled, frizzy curls are soft and pliant. She will tap the flat of the brush on his shoulder when he squirms, and she will run her fingers softly through his hair and over his scalp until he is calm. She looks to her fingers, where they are shaking.

She has slumped fully to the floor, the cold clacking her teeth together. Her arms cross and her hands rub at her arms as if they have minds of their own. She chokes in the back of her throat and feels her breath stutter to a halt.

"Lucy!" Now he is kneeling in front of her and frowning. His hands come up to pat her cheeks gently, his little face serious. She continues to tremble -- her whole body shakes violently from the cold, and he tries to encircle her with his arms to convey some warmth, though he is smaller than she is, for now at least. If they ever grow up, the two of them, he will become tall and broad. He will tower over her, like their father.

She sucks in a wild breath at that thought and feels like her chest breaks and fractures as she starts to sob hysterically, silently.

"You are afraid. I will protect you, Lucy." He has crawled into her lap now and has both thin arms wrapped around her, one hand patting her shoulder. By the time she has finished crying she thinks that she will need to wash his hair again for him, so encrusted with her snot and tears will it be come morning. But for now she sits quietly in the dark and the cold, her forehead on his shoulder, the heavy, warm weight of him in her lap soothing. And she finds herself humming the lullaby, and rocking the two of them gently, almost as though she is comforting him and not the other way round.

"It was a ghost, was it not?" He draws back to look at her. "You saw a ghost."

 _A ghost with painful stubble and too much hair and hands that hurt and shamed her so that her skin felt filthy, begrimed with sin._ But here he is, watching her in his innocence, and for a moment her love for him flairs into a vicious hatred, for why should he sit here with her, he in the privilege of his innocence with his messy hair and his clean, pale skin? She lifts a hand and gently pinches his pointed chin in her fingers.

"Yes, Tommy," she says. Her voice sounds reedy, shrill. "It was a ghost. It frightened me." He draws a breath and frowns up at her. In that moment she wants to ruin him, to tear him to pieces as he sleeps up here in a luxury she had never realized they had before this night: the luxury of their father's barely passing acknowledgement of their existence. (And now Lucy had lost that privilege; she lost it when she committed the grave error of tiptoing downstairs to get a book from the library, and had walked in on him in his cups, and drawn his attention.) Yes, at this moment she hates her brother, wants to dismantle his childish ignorance piece by rotten piece, like the rafters of this old, cursed house.

But then he squeezes both of his hands over the one that holds his chin. "I will keep you safe, Lucy. I will always keep you safe," he says.

*****

It begins when she is twenty and he is eighteen.

She opens her eyes to sunlight streaming through the glass and loud voices from the lobby. This would not do. She should be resting. Instead, a man's frustrated voice goes back and forth with the nun she has come to think of as Sister Bulldog.

" _J'exige la voir! Je dois, elle est ma s--_ "

" _Elle ne voit pas les visiteurs._ "

" _Je m'en fiche! Elle n'est pas une prisonnière!_ "

" _Non. Elle est une patiente._ "

" _S'il vous plait, je dois la voir. Je suis désolé, veuillez m'excuser, s'il vous plait. Je suis désespéré._ "

His speech is refined, his French polished, at least from what Lucille can tell. Her staunch refusal to learn the language of her new home had begun in a bout of opposition and spite toward her caretakers, and now simmered quietly on its way to apathy and habit. So when the squat and thoroughly square nun appears before her and addresses her " _Mademoiselle . . . un homme est ici, et--,_ " Lucille cuts her off with a wave of her hand.

" _Anglais._ " She doesn't say "please." Lucille thinks she will never say "please" again, not to anyone.

The sister clenches a bovine jaw. "I shall send this gentleman away. He should not disturb your rest."

"No, no." Lucille sits up, yawns and arches her back, blinks in the sunlight. She rubs sleep from her eyes. "Now I am curious. Send him in." But a shadow has fallen over the sunlight in front of her chair. Apparently this fellow has no sense of propriety. Certainly he does not respect her need to rest. The sister opens her mouth to speak, but thinks better of it before moving away.

And now here he is kneeling on the floor in front of her, speaking to her (not over her, nor about her) and despite her sleepiness she cannot help but notice that he is a good-looking gentleman and that his voice -- now that he is not shouting -- is ever so sweet. And there it is, an awakening of secret warmth, one that makes her fretful at the same time that it makes her breath come deep and heavy. He is a handsome man, and his eyes are kind. He is in the flush of his youth, cheeks still rounded with traces of childhood, yet voice pitched low and lovely. It makes her want to believe that this is not her own life she is living, that in another life she could trust a man's kind eyes and comforting voice.

Lucille is still hazy with sunlight and sleep, and she wonders that this strange man continues to say that he is sorry, that he would have come earlier -- years earlier -- if he had known, that he has failed her.

She is getting very tired. He reaches up and takes one of her hands. His own is warm, a bit sweaty, fine-boned. Annoyed, she looks down. On the top of his hand is a curious, curved scar, faded to near invisibility on his pale skin. She sees another beam of sunlight: streaming in an attic window, dust motes floating in it, a dark head bent over tools and wood. She kept telling him not to block his own light when he bent over so, to not press so hard with the veiner. He would typically listen to her, bend his ear to her advice, but on this occasion he had not. The gouge had slipped from his small fingers, sliced an arc and embedded the point into his skin. Terrified, he had wailed in pain and thrashed so that the blade shoved even deeper. She had run to him and shushed him, drawn the blade out as gently as she could and bandaged the wound as best she knew how, held him quietly and sung to him while he sobbed into her shoulder. That other beam of sunlight, blood running from a little wounded hand -- all part of that other life.

So why should _this_ man have a scar that looked like that?

"Lucy," he says. "Lucy, do you know me?" His voice is deep and calm, now, but it _still_ sounds frightened.

Lucille snaps her head up and spits in his face.


	2. Chapter 2

They grow up with two bases of knowledge upon which to orient the rest of their world: that they are poor, and that they are alone but for each other. They cling to each other in bed, every night, whispering secrets, forbidden fairy-stories. Sometimes, they listen at the nursery door for the playing of the piano downstairs. He has difficulty sleeping, especially in the winter, even when she holds his smaller body tightly against her own for warmth and sings him lullabies.

He does not want to sleep, he says, for fear that the ghost will come in the night and frighten her. He will not be there to ward it off with his little fists.

When the ghost does come for her he shies away from it, afraid.

"Lucille," it says, the ghost. "Lucille," her mother says, pulling him into a reluctant embrace. "Your father will see you in the library now. I shall put Thomas to bed."

When she returns to the nursery, her mother is sitting in the rocking chair by the fire, fingers moving over each other rhythmically, as if constantly on the piano keys. Tommy is asleep in his bed, covered almost entirely by his fraying blankets.

"We are departing again tomorrow to go abroad. The nurse will be by to check on you a few days each week. But you are the lady of the house now, Lucille. Look after your brother." Her mother pauses, fingers tapping against each other. She looks to the fire. "He is all that I have."

Lucy nods, a fist squeezing tightly on her heart. She looks down at the worn floorboards. If he were not here to look after, would it be different? Her mother would have _Lucy_. Her mother drifts out of the nursery, and Lucy climbs into his bed. Tommy opens his eyes, bird-bright. He wraps an arm about her waist and squeezes, tucks his head under her chin.

"You should be asleep, goose."

"Mother frightens me." He buries his face against her chest. Lucy sighs out a breath, letting her body go lax around him. He is so thin, so small and warm. _Safe._

He wiggles a bit. "Lucy."

"Tommy."

"Mother and Father are leaving tomorrow. Promise me we shall have some adventures."

Lucy smiles. This she can manage. "We shall." She presses her lips to the top of his head, and basks in his warmth.

It is only a few days before they grow painfully bored and fidgety. Nurse has not come by, and neither of them quite know how to cook, and neither of them quite knows what to do with the freedom of the whole house at their disposal. They play at being lord and lady for a bit. They wander the moors outside of the hall, until they come across a dead fox kit, shrunken in the gorse. She examines the little thing and contemplates whether she should tell him that it is unseasonably cold for the spring and that it makes perfect sense to her why the kit should die here, alone. It is only natural, of course. But he is crying almost to the point of hysteria at it, so she leaves it be.

Within a few weeks, the sweets have run out in the hall, and they simply _must_ have more. It is Lucy's idea to trek to town, though they do not quite know the way. They dress themselves in some of their oldest clothes, because it is only a true adventure if a young lord and lady go out among the commoners incognito. She raids her mother's jewelry box for some gold earrings. Surely this will purchase enough to get them by until their parents return.

Hours later they have arrived in town, dirty and shabby and covered in red dust and mud. They receive some strange looks from passersby, so Lucy takes his hand tightly in her own and glares at those who would look down on them. It is market day, and they find their way to the square and stare for many minutes, wide-eyed, at the bustle of people and the stalls of goods. She feels her stomach pinch in hunger.

They find the confectioner's stall rather quickly and select their treats -- as much as they want, Lucy tells him, fingering the gold earrings in her pocket. But when it comes time to pay, the vendor looks at the baubles in her dirty palm and narrows his eyes and turns them away. He keeps the earrings. She had not considered this weakness in their plan, that incognito lords and ladies might be taken for thieves.

She turns around and Tommy has vanished. Her body siezes up in a panic. He will starve on the street without her; he will end up small and broken under the hooves of carriage horses; he will vanish at the hands of a bad man and she will have nothing.

The vendor who took the earrings has stepped to another fellow's side and is speaking quietly to him. He gestures her way. The two men look at her, at her panicked dirty face and messy hair and shabby clothes. A flash of color at the corner of her eye, of bright green and yellow, and small clay-reddened hands reaching up to lift the toy from the second man's stall. There he is, eyes wide and curious, mouth open in wonder at the lovely handcrafted toy. It is a mistake to glance at him, for the toy vendor's suspicious gaze follows her own and lands on him.

"Filthy little thief!" The man strides around the table, snatches the toy back, and backhands Tommy across the face. Lucy sees his head snap to the side, sees the sudden bend of his fragile, lily-white neck, a drooping flower stem. He flies back and lands hard in the mud. His face registers confusion at first before it screws up in tears. The man advances once again and lifts him up off the ground by his thin wrist and shakes him fiercely.

Lucy goes taut and cannot breathe. The man's rough hands could be on _her_ , shaking her savagely as he roars in _her_ face and she drips mud from her clothes and blood from her lip. More shouting comes from across the square. An enormous, angry woman bears down on them like a charging bull and brandishes her walking stick, threatening.

"You let him go! You let him go, Ned, or so help me I'll crack you something nasty!" _warmth -- warmth and safety and scent of lavender_

Tommy drops, limp, to the ground. "Bloody hell, Teresa -- he's a thieving rat, he is."

"Nay, great fool, that's _young Master Sharpe!_ " Nurse booms, and she sweeps down to cradle him. Silence falls heavy on the market square, all but for Nurse's hoarse voice. "My lamb, what you doing here, and dressed so poorly off? Where is your sister?" Lucy finds her feet and sprints forward, and collides into Nurse's solid warmth just as Tommy straightens and touches his lip. She smells of lavender, still. "Well, Miss Lucy! And you too -- come back early from France, is it?"

 _France?_ A wave crashes over her: that they were left behind, that the task of seeing to their care, of even bothering to ask Nurse to check on them was unimportant enough to be forgotten, that the two of them are utterly disposable. Lucy tries not to cry. 

Nurse bundles them into a carriage headed back to the hall where, she says, she will get them cleaned up and settled, will see to their dinner and read them stories in front of a nice fire, and stay with them so they are not alone. A frown creases her small eyes, Lucy sees, as the carriage crests the hill and the hall appears fully before them. A coach-and-four stands in the front, and the driver is carrying boxes and luggage inside.

When Nurse leads them through the enormous entryway and into the parlor, her mother pinches her lips in distaste at the mud. Her father bristles.

"Teresa, get them out of here. It is unsightly," her mother says. But Nurse has begun to talk, to explain _why_ they have come up from the village, dirty and hungry, and as Lucy prepares to defend their actions Tommy straightens his shoulders and looks up.

"I did not steal it. I did not steal that toy. I just looked at it." Lucy feels her belly plunge down, down, straight down to the basement; she wishes that she could take him and flee with him, hide him in one of the empty clay vats, away from sight, as their father's pale blue gaze shifts from Nurse and moves to her brother's face and finally settles there, settles for good.

"Teresa," he says, watching Tommy, hawklike. "Go upstairs and draw the children a bath. Make sure the water is piping hot. Draw the bath, and then leave by the servants' entrance. We will be hiring tutors for the children now. Thank you for your services."

Nurse is gone. Tommy's scrawny shoulders shrink back under Lucy's hands. Their father maintains his gaze. "Beatrice, how is it that my son still plays with toys?" His large hand comes to rest on her brother's face, cradling the jaw in his palm, fingers laid across the back of his fragile neck.

"I do not play with them, sir. Father. I _make_ the--" Their father's hand flexes, gentle-like, deceptive, and while Lucy knows his great strength ( _force on her jaws, pressure on her ribs_ ) she still cries out in shock at the violence with which his hand tears Tommy from her grasp and hurls him, spinning, straight into the wall. He slams against it so hard she wonders that the plaster does not crack, so hard she marvels that his heart's blood does not come bursting out of his mouth as he crumples slowly to the floor.

"What a disappointment he is, Beatrice." Their father brushes the dirt off his one hand and steps out. 

Her mother canes her until Lucy cannot walk.

*****

"Do explain to me, doctor, how it is possible that my own sister has been locked in this-- this _madhouse_ all this time and I was not kept apprised of this fact." Lucille blinks and feels the urge to flinch. Instead, she looks at her hands and releases her breath, slow and quiet. She fixes her gaze on her hands -- large hands, for a woman, with long enough fingers, thankfully, that her hands can spread over piano keys more than her mother's probably had. She looks at her hands and inhales then, slow and quiet, and breathes in the scent of the worn leather upholstery in Doctor Bildhauer's office.

The doctor puffs out a breath from under his moustache. "Mr. Sharpe," he intones, and his voice gathers together all the ponderous weight of a late middle-aged man of experience, of science and prestige and publications of case studies, of invited public lectures and expertise dispensed to the most promising of young medical students at the University of Vienna and thoughtful observations of patients at _Burghölzli_ in Zürich (as he likes to remind his patients, staff, visitors, and, Lucille suspects, even the squirrels on the hospital grounds). "Mr. Sharpe," he intones.

" _Lord_ Sharpe," Thomas snaps. His voice cracks high on the word "Lord." 

The doctor raises a bushy eyebrow and lifts his cigar to his mouth. " _Young_ Mr. Sharpe," he says, and puffs on the cigar. "As I am neither beholden to your Crown of England nor a supporter of any of the ridiculous aristocratic hierarchies instantiated therein, nor anywhere, in fact, I am under no obligation to honor or even acknowledge the existence of your title. I," he says, the doctor, "am a socialist." (And Lucille is sure that he informs everyone, including the squirrels, of that fact as well.) "Do sit down. Unruffle your feathers."

"I did not abandon her. Lucy, I did not abandon you! I looked for you, I went to Geel to see if you were there." Thomas's voice drops in pitch. From the corner of her eye she can see that his face is turned toward her own. She returns her focus to her breath and her hands. "You should not have been locked in a madhouse with lunatics."

"Mr. Sharpe, does this retreat look like a madhouse to you? Did the other women in the recreation room look like gibbering lunatics? Does your sister look like one? I invited you here to my office, sir, to enlighten you as to where Miss Lucille has been and how far she has come since she joined my other patients here several years ago. If you wish to know, then I suggest that you _listen_."

"I am sorry," Thomas mutters. "I have been desperate. Two weeks searching for her, and all I could imagine was her chained up in some cell somewhere, or imprisoned, or something equally awful." Out of the corner of her eye, Lucille sees that he is raking one hand through his hair.

It is still endearingly messy, as if he is still a boy.

"And all the time, my boy, she has been right here, resting in the sun, as she should. Taking short walks in the garden, as she should. Eating less that half of what she is told, as she should _not_. Plying her hand at music more than twice as much as she is supposed to." Doctor Bildhauer's eyes twinkle at her before they turn back to Thomas. "But for your distress, Mr. Sharpe, I am sorry. Ah, sir, I am _terribly_ sorry. Her first two years here were quite difficult, and so I did not allow her to receive letters, in an effort to maintain stability here. This must have begun the pattern of this . . . miscommunication. Such is the practice here, and with you being a minor up until now, and there being no parents to keep you informed, well. But all the same, I am sorry for your distress." 

Lucille appreciates the doctor's move: to establish a hierarchy in which he himself is dominant, and then pretend to pay deference to the one below him by way of fabricated apology. It is a model of manipulation that works perfectly on Thomas, who straightens a bit in his chair, content in the illusion that he and the doctor have reached a kind of understanding as if between equals.

She would reproduce this move, if she could, but it truly would only work between men. Lucille has come to rely on other ways to manipulate people. She wrinkles her nose at the prospect of the future; she has always found tears rather coarse, but they will work plenty well on Thomas, she supposes.

"Now then." The doctor opens the thick patient chart labeled " **L. SHARPE** ," unfolds his spectacles and places them on his nose, loops the curved earpieces over his ears. "Let us begin with the good. Miss Lucille shall return to England with you, and should you work to reproduce there the conditions under which she has thrived _here_ , then it is unlikely that she will have a relapse. I rely in my practice upon a balance of rest, proper diet, massage, and very short sessions of mental or physical activity. It has shown, in the vast majority of my patients with neurasthenia and other, more complicated conditions such as that of your sister, to make for some significant improvement in their condition. Perhaps, Mr. Sharpe, you have heard of the work of one Weir Mitchell, in America?"

Thomas brightens. "Oh! Yes. Doctor Mitchell delivered a lecture series at Cambridge. I had the fortune of attending one. He spoke of hysteria in his patients who were war veterans. He developed this treatment . . . the rest treatment?"

"The rest cure, yes. He and those of his school, such as I, have found that some version of it works equal wonders on women patients. And your sister is one of the many beneficiaries of it. Though she has not gained nearly as much fat as I would like to see."

Lucille inclines her head very slightly, a signal the doctor notices. "Yes, my dear?"

"Pardon me, doctor. Since I am to leave here, I should like to begin saying my goodbyes. Perhaps I could take this opportunity to do so while you two gentlemen talk." The doctor smiles at her, and he smiles at Thomas. _Do you see her?_ that smile says. _Do you see the almost-normality of my creation?_

"By all means, Miss Lucille." Light reflects off of his reading glasses; instead of his eyes she sees two blank, pale circles of light. She affects a peaceful smile and rises. Her gaze falls to a decorated letter opener on his desk, with a sculpted ivory handle. Ivory, he has told her (and the other patients, and the squirrels) from a great bull elephant he shot while hunting in the Protectorate. She imagines the cool ivory in her palm, imagines the tinkle of glass as his spectacles shatter under the blade.

"Doctor Bildhauer. Brother." She dips briefly at the door before turning to leave. She does not look up to meet Thomas's eyes.

Lucille retreats to the garden, to her spot on the circular stone bench beside the statue of Saint Dymphna. She sits in the dappled sunlight and weeps bitterly into her hands until one of the sisters comes to join her and holds Lucille's shaking shoulders, to wait while the men discuss her past and her future, to wait until she is discharged from _L'Asile du Lis d'Irlande_ and given into her brother's custody, now that he is old enough for the responsibility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In high school (many years before anti-bullying rules), I saw a small, skinny kid get casually spun around and thrown hard against a wall by a much bigger kid, and I never forgot it. So it's here in all its awfulness.
> 
> As for the part that takes place in the asylum, I really wanted to depict Lucille's asylum and treatment in a way that might actually ring sort of true for the late nineteenth century. The mid-eighteenth century saw a lot of reformation in asylums and public hospitals for humane treatment of people with mental illness, so hence, Lucille is generally treated well and is pretty conflicted at the prospect of leaving. I have no idea to what extent the Viennese and continental schools of psychiatry and psychology (and the emerging psycho-analysis) were dealing or interacting with practices in America and Britain. But I'm not ultimately going for really meticulous accuracy here.
> 
> Silas Weir Mitchell did a lot of stuff with neurology and psychiatry; he's probably most famous nowadays for the rest cure and his treatment of women patients. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" is a famous depiction of it. Gilman and later Virginia Woolf said that the rest cure basically drove a sane woman insane. Which is true, because it was pretty fucked up. On the other hand, it wasn't straitjackets, et al.
> 
> The Burghölzli is the name of the psychiatric hospital associated with the medical school at the University of Zürich in Switzerland.
> 
> L'Asile du Lis d'Irlande means "Asylum of the Lily of Ireland." Saint Dymphna was a virgin martyr, and is the patron saint of sufferers of mental illness, runaways, and victims of incest. She's called the "Lily of Ireland," since she escaped her homeland, Ireland, and ended up in Belgium, where she was martyred in Geel and was buried. Thereafter the city became a famous place for pilgrims seeking her chapel, and for sufferers from mental illness to seek treatment. There was a huge, famous hospital there that gradually became overburdened so that patients were taken in and cared for by locals. The latter is still practiced in Geel today. Lucille's asylum isn't actually in Geel; this is part of the reason why Thomas has been frantic trying to find her on the continent.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With many thanks to the lovely Philosopher_King for reading this chapter for me, and for her patience as I then went and forgot to post it until months and months afterward! oooof.

Teresa only returns to them when their parents leave for abroad, but tutors begin to come regularly, tasked with the difficult project of educating them and, Lucy suspects, the additional, unexpected work of civilizing them. They take all of their lessons in the nursery, since their mother insists that they will dirty the rest of the house.

First comes a governess. She has long teeth and a bulbous wart on the side of her nose from which sprouts a bristle of stiff brown hairs. Mrs. Bell teaches them to read and write, and she tells them stories with morals at bedtime before she puts them down in their separate beds. "Good children sleep in separate beds," sniffs Mrs. Bell, "especially a sister and a brother. Sin," she drones, "turns such things to perversion."

"Madame," Tommy asks, "what is sin?"

"Miss," Lucy asks, "what does perversion mean?" She is cuffed for her impertinence.

The governess proves unsympathetic to their fear of ghosts, and insists that such terrors are instead prompted by devils. This information only makes them cling more tightly to each other at night. Mrs. Bell snaps that they are intractable and unnatural children, and she soon ceases coming to them.

They much prefer their tutors, who replace the governess. In the morning are lessons in numbers and science. Lucy watches her brother open like a flower to Master Trevithick's praise, while she remains in the shadows. The master reassures her that it is perfectly normal for her to struggle, that she will be a woman, after all, and women are naturally more suited to the gentler arts.

She does grow interested in biology and anatomy, though, because Master Trevithick shows them pictures of different animals for part of it. Lucy notes the difference between the male and female animals in the pictures, and while she knows that males and females have separate properties and parts ( _hands and shame and rough hair on her cheek_ ), she is surprised at her spark of curiosity, as she glances under their pony's belly to see if it matches up with the picture in the biology book, as she looks, really _looks_ , at Tommy in the bathtub as she sits behind him, washing his hair for him.

He is rail thin, and very pale all over except for some bruises on his ribs. She can see his male parts stick out a bit, under the soapy water. Lucy removes one hand from his hair and puts it on top of him. He stiffens, in front of her body and under her hand.

"What are you doing? _Stop_ , it tickles."

"I am merely investigating, goose. Hold still."

"I don't like it," he whines, but he holds still for her.

In the afternoons he has lessons in Latin while Lucy is given the task of reading novels appropriate for young ladies: they are all stories about other young ladies who strive to gain the love of wealthy potential husbands. Lucy hates these stories; they tie up her belly in knots of anxiety, and anyway she does not like the feel and smell of books that their tutor brings up from the library downstairs.

Lucy has come to hate the library.

She takes a tentative pleasure in her first fumbling attempts at the piano, though, under the eye of a woman that Teresa has sent to her. Miss Evesham only visits when their parents are gone, and it is an unspoken understanding between Lucy and Miss Evesham that Lucy only practices the piano when her parents are not in the house. Miss Evesham has a raspy voice and perpetually pursed, thin lips. When she positions Lucy's hands on the keys her touch is gentle, and when she plays for Lucy, Miss Evesham does not look at her funny when Lucy cries. Lucy wants to be like Miss Evesham one day: a spinster with kind eyes and a gentle touch, one whose hands wring comfort from cold keys of ivory and ebony.

Lucy cries because she knows she will never be like Miss Evesham. Instead, Lucy will be like her mother: she knows this when she snaps at Tommy. He has descended the stairs and trotted up to her, eager to show her a doll's head he has just finished carving, that he will affix to a fabric body. The face is eerily human -- human in the details of its nostrils, flared as if on a sharp inhale, and in its plump lips, like a bow. Eerie in its blank, black eyes. Lucy glances towards it and her fingers fumble on an arpeggio. A flare of hot rage bursts in her chest. "I do not _care_ about your stupid carvings," she hisses, and siezes the doll's head from his hand and throws it across the room. Tommy's face crumples, though he tries to hide it, as the wooden head bounces off the floor and comes to rest on a shabby couch.

This is where her father finds it, later that night when he returns. He turns it over in his hand; the delicate ridges of wood press against the rough callouses of his fingers. "The boy made this?" Light from the fire reflects off her father's spectacles. Lucy sees pale, blank circles of light instead of his eyes from where she sits in silence, in the chair across from her mother. She folds her hands in her lap and opens her mouth, closes it.

"Answer your father, Lucille." Mother's voice, brittle, grates against her father's louring silence. Lucy opens her mouth and hesitates. Tommy is upstairs in the nursery, sleeping, she has told her parents. She did not tell them that he fled in fear when the coach drew up to the house.

"He did, sir. He made it." Lucy takes a breath and speaks in a rush. "He carved it in one morning. Tommy is ever so talented. I am so proud of him."

But her father is not listening to her now. He has clenched the wooden carving in one fist, as if to crush it, and his other hand has come up to rub at his forehead with thick fingers. Red face, barrel chest drawing in deep, slow breaths. Lucy shrinks into the chair as her father turns from the parlor for the stairs.

"He is a silly, effeminate boy. There is no teaching him." Her mother is frowning, tension in the set of her shoulders. Her eyes are fixed on the stairs. Lucy sees her brother's hands clasped around the doll's head, his eyes bright in a pale, smiling face. She flies up the stairs and pads down the hall to the nursery, heart pounding in terror.

"Now you are dead," Lucy hears through the door, just before she there is the thump of something heavy on the loose floorboards. "And my disappointment is over," her father finishes. She barely has time to scramble back and duck behind a drape before the nursery door swings open. He stands on the threshold for a moment, broad, red-faced, a pinched and wild look about this eyes. He is flexing his hands, and looks back over his shoulder for a moment, frowning, before he shakes his head and stalks off. 

In silence, Lucy creeps into the nursery, a lead weight in her belly. For a moment, all looks normal, cozy, even. There are the rumpled bedclothes, the fire crackling in the grate, the table under the window and its row of carved faces, the rocking chair by the fire. She recognizes their father's belt where it is draped over the back of the rocking chair, and there is an oddly shaped lump stretched out on the floor in front of the fire --

Lucy flies forward with a choked cry, flushed with a raw, uncanny terror at the realization that that object is his body, that the noise she heard was the sound of their father dropping him to the floor and walking away, like he had cast a fulsome bit of garbage to the ground. Tommy is ghastly white, almost grey, and his lips are bluish. She turns him gently on his back and takes his head in her lap, cries his name and can only hear the waspish sound of her own voice from that morning, as she snapped that she did not _care_ about his carvings. She would tear out her own tongue, if she could.

His face is so pale as to be almost translucent, traces of blue veins visible in the circles under his eyes. There is a little blood coming from his nose. Bruises -- the imprints of their father's massive hands -- are already blooming around his neck. She curls over him and, weeping, kisses his face: his forehead, cheeks, his eyelids. His soft mouth, over and over again. She recalls the chord progression Miss Evesham showed her, from something called a _lachrymosa_ (a thought intrudes -- _picardy third_ \-- insulting, it seems, to tears), and the ascension of mourning rises in her senses as she whispers a vow against his mouth to whomever might hear that she will sacrifice the very skin off her back, every last shred of innocence or goodness left in her -- she will scrape and murder and crucify her own flesh -- before she sees anyone touch him ever again, except for herself.

When he finally stirs under her Lucy smiles to herself, at the knowledge that their father's casual cruelty will cleave them together.

*****

He has learned to tie his cravat neatly, Lucille notes, looking at his neck to avoid his eyes. His stance and the set of his shoulders would bespeak a young gentleman proud as a peacock, did his fingers not move restlessly against his coat. His hand moves, hesitates, and comes to light on her upper arm.

"Come, Lucy, let us begin packing your things."

Lucille looks down, at the plain brown skirt of her dress and apron of undyed linen, at the worn leather of her shoes. She affects a meek voice when she speaks.

"I would, sir, but I have no possessions of my own." It is true, certainly: she, and most of the other patients here, have been entirely dependent on the charity of outsiders, who give to the sisters, who in turn have given to Lucille. Their habits are as plain as her own dress. 

That is not, of course, the reason why she tells him so.

"Ah," he says, and shuffles one foot in the gravel of the path. "I see." In her gut she feels a ripple of triumph at the hitch in his voice.

When it is time to depart, Lucille stands with him at the front gate marking the boundary between worlds -- her own world for the past six years, and that place that she can only think of as _outside_ , filled with terrors. The sisters surround her in their plain, shabby habits, and take turns holding her hands and patting her cheeks and wiping tears from their eyes. They murmur to her in a muddle of tongues, the sounds of French, of German, of English blending together into a low hum, the words inscrutable, the sentiments unmistakable. Lucille cannot respond, her breath is coming so heavy, but she meets their gazes and tries to smile.

When Thomas speaks to the sisters in his pretty French, his hand rests lightly on her shoulder. His voice is dulcet, genteel. Earnest. _Thank you_ , she hears in those tones. _She will be cared for and she will be loved_ , she hears. 

Sister Bulldog grips his sleeve in a meaty fist and tugs, and Thomas bends down so that she can speak low in his ear. Lucille cannot hear the words, and she could not understand them regardless, but she sees his eyebrows rise high as his face pales. The sister turns to her, then, and draws her into an embrace. "Stand steadfast, _cherie_." She slips a parcel into Lucille's hands and steps back. Thomas helps her into the carriage, the driver clucks to the horses, and then they are gone.

He starts in almost immediately. "Lucy, will you not speak to me?"

Lucille chokes on a breath and clutches the parcel and wonders where he is taking her.

"Will you not even look at me?" he cries.

The effort of lifting her head is massive, but she does manage to meet his eyes, finally. The raw hurt spread across his face exhausts her.

"I am very tired. I would like to rest."

He releases a breath in what sounds like relief. "And you shall rest. I thought -- I thought we could stay in the village. It's just a few miles south of here. There is a lovely little inn. We'll stay there tonight. We will get you some things you need, before we depart."

Lucille wants to tell him that she knows, of course, where the village is. She wants to ask him where he is taking her after that. But she nods and rests her head against the carriage window instead.

The inn is small but comfortable. Their rooms are next door to each other, and while Lucille already longs for the rougher woolen blankets of her own bed, just a few miles up the road, she finds the sunny spot by the window pleasant. When Thomas enters her room she is sitting there, her parcel still clutched in her lap. He wants to explain, he says, though he knows she is tired. She sees that he will not rest until he has spoken his piece.

He wrote to her, he says. For three years he wrote to her from school, sent his letters to their solicitor, who forwarded them to the convent of Saint Dymphna. When he heard nothing back, he thought she spurned him, so he stopped writing and mourned in solitude. When he came to his eighteenth birthday, one month ago (he is a child of spring, Lucille is winter's child), he came into his inheritance and gained access to the legal documents detailing the disposition of the estate. Lucille does not understand all that he speaks of; she does not readily follow his meticulous, anxious account of the death of the solicitor, some lost documents, and the difficulty Thomas had had gaining access to the Sharpe papers. But she feels a kind of keen, razor-edged joy at hearing of his shock when he found among the mess that the name of the saint had been right, but it was an _asylum_ , not a convent.

"They had lost even the address, dear Lucy," he says. His cheeks flushed with shame, he tells of a mad flight to the only Saint Dymphna's anyone in England seemed to know about, his arrival at a town in Belgium and frantic search for her in the lunatic sanctuary there, in the boarding houses, even on the streets. His voice is hoarse, and it gives a boyish crack again when he bursts out, anguished, that he thought she had died. Lucille watches as he lifts a hand to wipe the cuff of his sleeve against his eyes. She sees his gold cufflink; she sees that the signet ring on his finger fits Thomas perfectly, as if he were made for it.

He is still speaking, as Lucille watches that ring flash in the sunlight, as she sees it on her father's thick finger, pinching tight, as she feels slippery, lukewarm lard under her own fingers. Lucille had slid, twisted and pulled at it for an eternity (memory told her) before it slid off the swollen, dead digit. Let Thomas take it on now, that sickening burden, weighing down his hand . . .

" . . . Lucy? Can you hear me?"

"It was the chaplain at the shrine," Lucille says abruptly. Thomas blinks. "The shrine of the saint? You said the chaplain found you in despair and he was able to direct you here, that he knew of this place and told you it was the smaller sister-house of the convent in the city. That is how you found me. I am not mad. I can listen." Lucille is not entirely sure she is _not_ mad. But she can listen and remember at the same time.

"I promised you, I _promised_ you we would never be apart." He is sitting very close to her, on a chair next to her windowsill. He has taken her hands in both of his. "I am sorry, Lucy. I am sorry that I failed you. I am sorry I left you alone. I should have searched for you sooner, solicitor and legality be damned. I was afraid -- I was afraid you did not want me to come. I was afraid you had forgotten about me." His implicit question almost makes her laugh. He was always there, in flashes of memory: the curl of lashes on a pale, rounded cheek as he slept; a dark head bent over paper, sketching a plan for a flying machine he imagined he would build someday; pounding feet, and the laughter of a child given absolute freedom in an empty house; that slight point at the edge of his jaw, the faintest beginning of manhood, as his head fell back on the pillow, his heated flesh under her hands.

Every minute of every hour of every day for six years, she remembered him. And here he is in front of her, the same boy but grown and chiseled into a man, tall now, like their father was, but not so broad, and he has their mother's wide grey eyes, only they are rendered _kind_ on Thomas. Her heart is a bird fluttering against the walls of her chest. She recalls her patient file in his hand before they left, how he had slipped it into his case, to read for later, no doubt.

"It is alright, Thomas. I forgive you." Her forgiveness and that file, Lucille knows, will be punishment enough for him.

It is after dinner, and a few hours before supper, and there is still the matter of her clothing. Thomas escorts her up the high street on his arm, like she is a great lady, and they find a dressmaker's shop. He has spoken to her as they walked, has told her how they will find her a dress that suits her; it will be whatever she pleases, no matter the cost. She is no longer a prisoner of that awful asylum, he says. If she desires velvets and silks, he says, then she shall have them. She has only to ask, Thomas says, and he will grant her all that she wishes. His crushing feelings of guilt are audible in the almost-cheerful, eager solicitude of his voice.

Lucille tries to focus on her breath as she scrambles to keep up with his long stride. She tries to focus on the heated warmth of his arm against her own, to tamp down her terror at this wide open space of the high street. Thomas is so intent on his mission that he does not seem to notice her tripping feet and her clinging grip.

He does not notice the pitying looks of the two women at the dressmaker's, the pursed lips of the woman who takes her measurements and the slight distaste on the face of the younger woman who shows her the fabrics. They look at Lucille's plain dress and glance at each other knowingly, a silent exchange. As the patients at the asylum know of the village down the road, so do the villagers know of the asylum, and of its inhabitants.

He does not notice the lingering, appreciative gaze that the younger seamstress casts on him, over and over, so single-minded is he on remaking Lucille in the image of the rescued sister, on imagining that she is happy at the wealth of open choices he leaves to her. All of the fabrics and colors will look lovely on her, he says. 

She does not know how to choose the fabric. The styles of dress available make her tired. She pleads with the seamstress to choose for her, but the woman does not understand English, so Thomas has to speak for her, his face a bit crestfallen. Lucille tastes a bitter, latent rage in the back of her mouth when the seamstress smiles too brightly at him.

Supper at the inn is an awkward affair. Lucille listens to him speak, his voice and face an anchor in this open world (though she could not remember his words this time if she tried). She concentrates on keeping her gaze fixed on his eyes, though she is frightened, and after a bit she feels as if a years' long thirst has been quenched. She is safe again, as long as she has Thomas; her heart thrums with an intensity that terrifies her and she loves him, she _loves_ him --

"Lucy? Will you not eat?" Lucille starts and wrenches her eyes from his face. Her stew sits in front of her on the table, untouched, vaguely brown in color.

"I am not -- am not . . . " Chunks of meat, marbled in fat, sit like heavy boulders in thickened, viscous broth. Her gorge rises at the thought of slaughter, the blood of innocent and stupid lambs. She swallows repeatedly against a sudden flood of saliva in her mouth. "Not hungry," she chokes, and bolts from the table, up the stairs, to her room and the sink.

He is right behind her, of course, because he cannot, he _cannot_ seem to leave her be for even a single moment, and he has a tentative, warm hand on her back as she retches water and bile from an empty stomach for hours, it seems, and he makes vague noises of comfort, or of anxiety or revulsion, perhaps. An awful thought swims to the surface: despite his words to her, she does not know him, this strange young man who has assumed ostensible control over her life now. 

All Lucille wants at this moment is to be left alone so she can rest in dappled sunlight, so she can leaf through the pages of her fairy book, so she can rise when she wishes and spread her hands over the piano keys, can retire to her small room in the dark and curl on her narrow bed and dream that small boy into her arms again; whether child or infant or imagined man, it did not matter because he was _beloved_ , whatever else he was. Instead now her body heaves steadily over the sink though her gut is empty, and with each wave her jaw knocks against the porcelain and saliva drips from her lips. He has gone quiet for the moment, and she imagines that perhaps he has left the room in disgust, such a fine, proper young man as he is now, so far removed from her own world of sweat and madness, of bile and fat and blood. She hates him for his cowardice; she hates him for leaving her alone again.

She hates him until she feels his fingers sweep sticky strands of her hair from her face, gather the tangled mass to hold it away from the sink, and bring a dampened handkerchief to wipe her brow, her temples, her neck. Her retching gradually subsides and he draws her up slowly and lets her lean against his chest while he rests his chin on the top of her head. (And it wasn't supposed to be like this, never like this. _She_ would tuck _his_ head under her chin and hold him against her. She would sing him their lullaby and promise to protect him from the ghosts.)

Lucille considers that her dirty face will have soiled his cravat, and she pulls back at that thought, wrapping her arms around herself. But he won't let her be; he sits her gently in the chair by the window, cradles her jaw in one hand and cleans her face with the handkerchief in the other hand. He rinses it, wets it again, and comes back to clean the sick out of her hair, or at least try to. 

He has pulled off his cravat and unbuttoned the collar of his shirt, and while he wipes ineffectually at her hair Lucille fixes her eyes on the damp hollow of his throat, the line of his collarbone. All of this, everything, is wrong. It is Lucille who should be cleaning his dirty face, touching his hair, speaking in a low voice to him. But his expression is calm, except for when he frowns as he fumbles the cloth; his eyebrows wrinkle, two lines appear between his brows, the tip of his tongue is pinched between his lips as he concentrates, and he is utterly, completely ineffectual with the cloth. He flings it to the floor, heaves a breath and shoots her a look that says _am I a failure?_ and -- ah, _there_ he is. There is her Tommy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tune that young Lucille has in her head at the end of the first section is the Lachrymosa movement from the Requiem of Mozart. It's in a haunting, minor key. In the last several bars there's a chord progression (I'm not enough of a musician to be able to describe the chords themselves, though Lucille would probably be) that's kind of glorious, and the piece ends on a major chord. This major chord at the end of a minor key section is called a picardy third. (Musician readers, if I'm getting this wrong, please let me know.) I love the ending of the Lachrymosa movement -- though Mozart didn't finish it -- but I imagine that Lucille would object to that picardy third.

**Author's Note:**

> Title of the work is that of Silas Weir Mitchell's 1877 book on hysteria/neurasthenia and the rest cure.
> 
> I shall sing praise-songs to the fabulous bitch who helped me with the French dialogue once she gets herself an AO3 username.


End file.
